Whenever "Christabel" is really not rough, it can be as
readily scanned by the true I laws (not the supposititious rules) of
verse, as can the simplest pentameter of Pope; and where it is rough
(passim) these same laws will enable any one of common sense to show
why it is rough and to point out instantaneously the remedy for the
roughness.
A reads and re-reads a certain line, and pronounces it false in
rhythm-unmusical. B, however, reads it to A, and A is at once struck
with the perfection of the rhythm, and wonders at his dulness in not
"catching" it before. Henceforward he admits the line to be musical.
B, triumphant, asserts that, to be sure the line is musical- for it
is the work of Coleridge- and that it is A who is not; the fault being
in A's false reading. Now here A is right and B wrong. That rhythm
is erroneous (at some point or other more or less obvious), which
any ordinary reader can, without design, read improperly. It is the
business of the poet so to construct his line that the intention
must be caught at once. Even when these men have precisely the same
understanding of a sentence, they differ, and often widely, in their
modes of enunciating it. Any one who has taken the trouble to
examine the topic of emphasis (by which I here mean not accent of
particular syllables, but the dwelling on entire words), must have
seen that men emphasize in the most singularly arbitrary manner.
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